Selected scenes from Sydney food exploration
The past week has been a wonderful combination of one of my best friends visiting, a CRAZY work development (will write more about that soon), and an amazing weekend trip to Noosa in Queensland. I was actually too busy really focusing on eating food there to take pictures of it, but I wanted to share some photos from the past week of food exploration all over Sydney. I constantly have a running list of about 30 restaurants and bars that I want to go to, and I was thrilled to be able to check a bunch of them off the list in the name of showing my friend around!
First up: dim sum at Zilver. Slightly removed from the main part of Chinatown in the city and semi hard to find in a shopping mall, this place is so worth the small hunt for it. It’s enormous, the carts are plentiful, and what’s pictured above (pork buns, salt and pepper squid, shrimp dumplings, and a couple vegetable dumpling dishes) are but a small sampling of what we got. I love eating dim sum (or yum cha as they call it here) in a big group because obviously this means you can order more food.
Also, Chinese broccoli is delicious, and any kind of steamed seafood dumpling makes my life. My capacity for dumplings is actually slightly frightening.
After walking from Coogee to Bondi the following day, we enjoyed brunch at Brown Sugar in Bondi, an adorable cafe I’ve been wanting to try for ages. I absolutely adore brunch in Australia. They are very into mushrooms (which I love) and incorporating vegetables into savoury brunches. I got a leek and herb omelette that was filled with mushrooms, rocket, and roasted tomato. YUM.
Another aspect of Sydney’s bar/restaurant scene that I absolutely adore is its small bars movement. These are bars that typically only have capacity for between 40 and 80 people, and often they have fantastic menus as well. I’d sampled wine and cocktails at the adorable Pocket Bar, but had always secretly craved their crepes. Getting a savoury prosciutto and saffron infused mozzarella crepe and coconut crumbed chicken tenders (in front) made my Monday night. Not pictured: the strawberry nutella crepe we got for dessert that was so good I fear I would be far too inappropriate in attempting to describe it.
The above dish is braised duck covering a slow poached egg over egg noodles at the ridiculously trendy Ms. G’s. One of the empire of Merivale restaurants (I am insanely jealous of the owner of Merivale, who basically controls a large part of the nightlife/food scene in Sydney), it has amazing Asian fusion dishes like the one above.
But the best is definitely the dessert called Stoner’s Delight 2.0. Firstly, how could you not love a dessert with a name like that. It has peanut brittle ice cream, a banana fritter, mars bar like rice krispie treats, and candied bacon. Hello excess!
The week also included some lovely red wine, tapas, and Jaimie’s Italian (which frankly I think is over-rated…but at least I went). So much eating out! We had a lovely dinner in tonight that was super veggie centric that I shall blog about later. What a fantastic week!
merrifood 